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Another Newbie with Questions

I'm new to the forum (pleased to me you) and new to spherical panoramas. I'm working on a project that involves making qtvr type panoramas and now just getting my feet wet. I've shot a series of images and stitched them using Hugin, but I'm having trouble with the next step, viewing the image as a spherical, navigable, panorama. Does it need to be converted to qtvr? Did I miss something in Hugin's output?

Any tips, or pointers to tutorials, would be appreciated. I've searched around a bit myself, on Hugin's site, YouTube and so on with no luck. Your help would be much appreciated.

For publication on the web, you would normally convert the equirectangular image to QTVR or Flash formats (CubicConverter, Pano2VR, KRPano, Flash Panorama Player etc). For stand-alone viewers that can display the equirectangular image directly in spherical, navigable form see http://wiki.panotools.org/Panorama_V..._alone_Viewers .
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John

Thanks a lot, John. I checked out Pano2VR, making my first spherical pan - yipee! Looks good, aside from the watermarks. If you or anyone cares to give an opinion about which converter is best I'd appreciate the insight.

On a slight different note, I shot this first one (proper term? I'm used to qtvr, but I think the technology has moved on) using a 20mm lens. I used the 20 because it's the widest I've got, but I was also thinking that the 20 would provide more detail and less distortion. (Ultimately I want to photograph still lifes (sorta) for these pans, and they'll have the kind of detail that viewers might want to linger on for a bit.) Would a wider lens do the same job? I notice that the 20 still gives a kind of fisheye look to the image. (Though that appears to be reduced with a wider frame).

The converters all produce much the same quality results but differ in the features they offer and ease of use. The lens you use to shoot the panorama has no effect on the general appearance of the panorama as any barrel or fisheye distortion is corrected in the stitching process. There's a difference in the amount of detail captured, dependent on the focal length of the lens, of course. See this comparison of panoramas shot with a 105mm lens and an 8mm fisheye: http://tinyurl.com/3jvmgjd
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For standard fullscreen viewing of spherical panoramas, an equirectangular image of around 6000x3000 pixels is needed for good quality. This gets converted into 6 cube faces of 1910x1910 (6000/pi) stored in the .mov or .swf file for the viewer. High resolution panoramas that offer deep zooming use multiple sets of tiles (subdivisions of the 6 cube faces) generated from very much larger equirectangular images. Choice of lens and camera sensor size depends on what you want to end up with. Longer focal lenses require more shots to cover the required field of view. More shots mean larger storage requirements and processing time. More shots also mean longer shooting times, which is an important factor when the scene contains movement or changing light conditions.
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John

I've been looking for a standalone player as well... and was set on krpano until i tried it. i know basic coding, but couldn't figure it out for the life of me.... tried Panotour Pro trial (which uses krpano) and it was nice and simple, but the price is too much ($400?)..... i think Pano2VR is the most cost efficient. there is a little bit of learning, but no major coding like krpano.

Many times people overlook or forget about the discounted software we offer when buying a pano head. If you purchased a pano head from our store you are still eligible for discount towards software. After you have a chance to play with the trial software (available for download from the vendors website) and know what software best suits your needs please contact us. We can save from 5%-20% off selected software.
Bill